SUCCESSFUL CULTIVATION 9 



them home. From them plants were raised ; but owing to 

 their having teen grown in a greenhouse, without probably 

 an annual rest, it was not found possible to keep them alive 

 more than two or three years. Nothing further was seen 

 of the Dahlia in this country until 1802, when John Fraser, 

 an enterprising nurseryman carrying on business in Sloane 

 Square, obtained from Paris some seeds of Dahlia coccinca, 

 a now well-known, single form with rather small, brilliant 

 scarlet flowers borne on long, rigid stems of a deep bronze- 

 green hue. From these he raised plants that flowered in 

 one of his greenhouses in the following year, and from 

 one of the blooms a coloured plate was prepared and 

 published in the Botanical Magazine, Tab. 762, a place 

 being thus secured for the Dahlia in the botanical literature 

 of this country. Ten years later the second edition of 

 Aiton's Hortus Kewensis was published, and in this work 

 two reputed species and three varieties were included. 



Abbe Cavanilles would appear to have been successful 

 in the raising and cultivation of his Dahlias. One of the 

 plants raised from the Mexican seed produced semi-double 

 flowers in 1790, and in January of the following year was 

 figured in his Icones et Descriptiones Plantarum, the publi- 

 cation of which was commenced at Madrid in 1791, as 

 Dahlia pinnata, the early designation of the species now 

 known as D. variabilis. Cavanilles dedicated the plant to 

 M. Andre Dahl, a Swedish botanist of distinction, and the 

 author of a work on the Linnaean system published in 1784. 

 We have thus evidence that the doubling of the Dahlia in 

 Europe commenced in the year in which it first flowered 

 in Spain. The failures to grow the Dahlia when first 

 introduced to this country and France were due to culti- 



